Firefox

Gizbuzz, with Jen Mazzon and Sam Schillace of the Google Docs and Spreadsheets team (both ex-Writely).

When in Windows I use FeedDemon and have used many others; but I like FeedDemon and pretty well live in it :). I can’t say the same for any of the offerings I have seen or tried for Linux. I even tried a couple of the ones that are available as Firefox extensions but I never liked them in Windows and that feeling hasn’t changed on this side of the bridge either.

I’ve pointed other people at the Minimo Project, a minimized version of Firefox for Windows Mobile. I don’t have a Windows Mobile device, so I have not been able to test yet. However, since I am looking at a new phone due to the endless resets of my Treo 650, I have been looking at browsers other than Pocket IE. Reviews I have received are pretty good.

he Rich AJAX Platform is ready to help you create AJAX-enabled Web applications using the methods and concepts of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. In fact, RAP can be thought of as RCP for the Web, and that means, among other things, that a large part of the existing code from desktop RCP applications can be used to run them in a browser.

La semana pasada Google introdujo unas cuantas características nuevas en Gmail, como la opción de poder hacer forward de una conversación entera y no de un solo correo.

In general, I don’t blog about new products and ideas but this one really caught me; Fleck is a great utility for web developers; it’s a browser extension (currently Firefox only) that allows you to take notes on web pages and share with your friends, colleagues. This will be very useful for me, I’ll use it in my projects and to take private notes about pages I like. The last site I’ve found that useful was Writely.. I don’t know how will Fleck end up! By the way, to give it a quick try, see my blog flecked!

itsdEx is the world’s first social trading site where you can trade anything. People buy and sell itsdEx shares in their favorite websites. Something gets more popular? The price goes up. Less popular? You got it, it tanks. itsdEx is built with Ruby on Rails, includes a Firefox and Flock toolbar, built in blog, profiles, itsdEx cash bonuses for referring others, and much more.

Here’s a great essay explaining why people shouldn’t put RAR archives in torrents. They are useless and they make “selective downloading” impossible.

Tonight I've been to a free talk at Skillsmatter by Dave Crane, all round Javascript guru and co-author of my favorite Ajax books: Ajax in Action.

To celebrate the launch of Firefox2.0, Mozilla foundation held the Firefox summit 2006 at Mountain View office, the headquarter near Google office. As I know, this is the second time that this summit is held. It's great that I can have such a chance to be here, get to know some guys who I only know the nickname from the IRC channel or the bugzilla. To share some idea with some other guys who can't be here, I'd like to draft some stuff in the following days. Hope it helpful.

Maybe everyone already knew about these, but I just stumbled on them a few weeks ago and found some more yesterday. You can have animated favicons in Firefox! The icons for each site on the Firefox tabs are animated and when you bookmark them, the bookmark icon is animated too. A quick peek at the HTML of a page with animated favicons shows they simply have a 16�16 animated gif and point the page to that as their favicon with this:

There are a few problems – no USB ports, no wireless internet, and I’m pretty sure that the security can’t really handle even the most basic of firewalls and spam blockers yet. On the other hand, the thing can handle 330 trillion operations per second (more than 100,000 times the speed of a normal PC), its energy efficiency is more than one million times that of your average computer, and it’s so small that it’s invisible to the naked eye.

The beta 2 release of the asp.net ajax library brings drag and drop support for ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts in both Safari and Firefox. DND support has been around for Firefox since the Atlas March CTP. However, it was accidentally left out of the beta 1 release of asp.net ajax. Now it's back with additional support for Safari.

Aquí la novedad ya que alguien se ha dedicado a crear los ficheros para importar los templates a Radrails. Incluye 199 de ruby y 48 rhtml.

When I started out with Rails, I was using Notepad++ and it served my needs fine. Recently, I made the switch to the excellent RadRails IDE. I’m still learning my way around this Eclipse based tool, but overall I’m very impressed. I just discovered another excellent Ruby on Rails blog - Dr Nic. In his latest post, he has put together a config file for using “snippets” within RadRails. I’ve read lots of praise for the defacto ROR editor on the Mac, TextMate, and one of its best features is snippets. Well, now ROR developers on Windows have snippets too. Great stuff!

The goal of the “Tamarin” project is to implement a high-performance, open source implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) language specification. The Tamarin virtual machine will be used by Mozilla within SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, and other products based on Mozilla technology. The code will continue to be used by Adobe as part of the ActionScript(tm) Virtual Machine within Adobe® Flash® Player.

while dealing with large and nested amounts of data, you might think about adding more usability to your website with a search function. with AJAX you can do it even better than with a static submission.

A new week, a new post. We’re almost finished with our research on existing applications (similar to our idea) and willingness by teachers and students in using our application. While finishing our research I’ve started learning AJAX. At this point it’s uncertain if we will be using this technology to realise our application. There’s also a possible use in Ruby on Rails and Flex.

I think that given what the free open source community has achieved especially in the short term, project wise, it is plain to see one does not need to invest $100 million dollars to develop a course management system. For Blackboard to break even on their costs and make a profit, I would suspect that Blackboard’s CMS features a rather large price tag (note you don’t actually own what you paid for, you get a license to use it under their terms and restrictions). I personally thus do not support Blackboard on this matter because it’s interest in developing a patent portfolio (funny name; seem to be the next new thing…?) conflicts especially with free software projects that aim to make the world a better place by providing quality education tools and not make supernormal profits.

In other news, four out of eight administrators of the Finnish BitTorrent tracker ‘Finreactor’ have been declared guilty in court and have to pay damages totaling 60,000 dollars each. The lawsuit against Finreactor has just come to a close. This is believed to be only the first of many filed against the site. Three of the four administrators found guilty are under the age of 18. It is unclear how they are going to scrape together enough money to pay their fines. With a little help from Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi), the Finnish equivalent of the RIAA shut down Finreactor in late 2004.

At the moment they’re rare (e.g., TVNZ and MSN only show them once per user per day) but if we learned anything from 2001 it’s that greed will ruin user experience if it can get an extra buck in ad revenue. We got popup blockers as a result of the 2001 popup orgy. What’s going to save us from the 2007 float invasion?

Nick is responsible for this addiction. The screensaver that evolves, aka Electric Sheep. Download it from the website below, then set up either HTTP or BitTorrent downloading. Then, when your computer is idle, sexy visuals will display on the screen. And the more you leave the screensaver on, the more new sheep it will download for you.